“My parents stood still. It was like we were on two separate islands. Mom and Dad were on one, and I was on the other. And the ocean between us was the symbol of truth. The thing representing our truce.”

“Ariya was tall and fine-boned, with large doe-eyes framed by long lashes. She moved about the one-story house with a self-possessed grace in her purple dress. We thought she would make a good model. She could sell anything but perfume, because she always had a smell: parsley, cilantro, chicken, goat, sour sop, shop cheese.”

“When we talk about books…we are talking about our approximate recollections of books… What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion…We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. … What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands.”

“We were not many, and the world was very small. There were strange lands to the east- islands like Akutan; so we thought all the world was islands, and did not mind.”

“Out on the road outside Cheyenne Wells a great argument developed between Pomeray and Old Bull as to whether they were going to buy a little whiskey or lot of wine, one being a wino, the other an alcoholic. Not having eaten for a long time, feverish, they leaped out of the car and started making brawling gestures at each other which were supposed to represent a fistfight between two men...and the next moment they were embracing each other, old Pomeray tearfully, Old Bull raising his eyes with lonely sarcasm at the huge and indefatigable heavens above Colorado...because everybody was in a hole during the Depression, and felt it”

“If one comes to the sense that they have arrived, they no longer feel the need to submit themselves to the process of learning and growing. This is a dangerous mindset to carry. The day that we stop learning is the day we stop living.”

“She said Mom closed up the house one day, turned the oven on full, and sat by its open door. Apparently it's still a Cry For Help, even though our oven's electric.”